Typically, an organization is structured as a collection of individual elements. For example, in the corporate context, a business organization may be an aggregation of branches, divisions, regional offices, etc. However, the structure of an organization is often transparent to the outside commercial world. Thus, since each element independently incurs costs and liabilities, an organization must adopt a system for generating internal invoices to distribute such costs and liabilities to the individual elements.
In particular, service providers often bill an organization, as a whole, for services that are provided individually to various elements that comprise the organization. Subsequently, the organization must determine what portions of the billed charges are to be allocated to each element. The organization may also wish to adjust the charges allocated to an element by marking up/down the charges or including additional service fees, etc. After all allocations and adjustments are made, the organization must generate an internal invoice for each element.
In the past, the process of allocating, adjusting, and billing charges to the elements of an organization was a daunting task for any large organization to undertake. Traditionally, the process has been performed manually, which caused it to be labor intensive and extremely inefficient. The larger the organization, the more elements it is likely to contain. Thus, the larger the organization, the more time consuming and costly the process of generating internal invoices becomes.
The problem of generating an internal invoice for each element of a large organization is compounded by the fact that each element is likely to incur differing amounts of charges for a wide variety of products and services. The organization may wish to adjust the charges for each product and each service in a different manner, for example by a percentage or by a fixed amount. Further, the organization may wish to adjust the charges at a different rate or percentage for each element of the organization. Also, the organization may wish to charge varying amounts of miscellaneous fees to each of its elements.
Therefore, there remains a need for an automated system that allows an organization to generate an invoice for at least a portion of the billed charges incurred by the organization during a given period of time, and to distribute this invoice to an element of the organization.
Also, there remains a need for a system that allows an organization to automatically allocate billed charges to the elements of the organization and to adjust the allocated charges on a charge by charge and element by element basis.